


and does anything i say seem relevant at all?

by jewishhelenarobles



Category: Franny and Zooey - J. D. Salinger
Genre: (well maybe two), Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen, Trans Character, and it's just possible she's not qualified to say them, zooey has a couple of things she wants to say to buddy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-17
Updated: 2020-11-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:07:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27608759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jewishhelenarobles/pseuds/jewishhelenarobles
Summary: Zooey finally sends a response to Buddy's letter.
Relationships: Buddy Glass & Zooey Glass, Franny Glass & Zooey Glass
Kudos: 1





	and does anything i say seem relevant at all?

**Author's Note:**

> Before we start, here are some ready-made responses to comments from any would-be hecklers out there:
> 
> 1\. “Setting this story in the modern day elides the historical specificity of the original text!” — wrong. Entirely incorrect. Almost every social phenomenon from the original novel has its analogue in the present day. There are still actors in New York; there are still quiz shows; there is still nepotism; there are still upper-middle-class, mostly-assimilated Jews. Sorry for wanting better for Zooey than the three-item clothing rule, I guess.  
> 2\. “This is obviously written by someone who knows nothing about theology!” — oh, wow, you noticed! Congrats! I don’t really give a shit. I’m not about to do research for a 2,000 word fanfic. However, if you must know, I do deal with immanent theology and I’ve included a reference to my friend Aleph’s beautiful review of When Marnie Was There (located here: https://letterboxd.com/aleph_null/film/when-marnie-was-there/), which is, frankly, all the theology reading I’ll ever need.  
> 3\. “This is unrealistically optimistic!” — yeah, it's fanfic. It’s allowed to be wish fulfillment. If you want drawn-out angst, go read something else; this website has that in spades.
> 
> As always, I’m transmisogyny-exempt, and if you’re a trans woman who finds any of this to be wrong or offensive, let me know and I’ll fix it as soon as I can.

February 23, 2020

Dear Buddy,

I’ve had your letter in my bedside drawer for going on six years now. It’s covered in schmutz and falling apart and all the advice in it is out of date. Still, I read it constantly — if not every few weeks like I used to in the beginning and started up doing again early last year, then certainly every couple of months or so, whenever I have a slow afternoon or I can’t get to sleep. I never responded to it. Oh, sure, we’ve _talked_ since then; I think I called you the week after it was first delivered and we went back and forth over some of the things you said. But I never wrote you a letter back. Consider this a very belated follow-up.

To get the preliminaries out of the way: Franny is fine. She’s doing better than I’ve ever seen her, in fact. We’re planning to go to California to visit some friends next year if our work allows for it. She’s been doing voice work lately, like I have, but she just started rehearsals for a new play on Broadway that we both would have written off without even finishing the script two years ago. She also hasn’t been involved with any shitty guys for at least a year. I’m not the only one who’s changed, as you can see. Bessie is entirely the same as she was in 2014 and most likely ever will be.

There, now that’s over and done with. I’m not going to insult you by beating around the bush any more. This isn’t a how-do-you-do letter, it’s not a gee-it’s-been-a-while letter, it’s not even really a you-never-call-you-never-write letter, although that’s part of it and I will get around to saying that later on. It’s not going to be at all pleasant for you to read. If it’s any consolation, it’ll be even more painful for me to write.

The primary subject of this letter is, of course, your reaction to my being a woman. Everyone else in the family has more or less come around to it by now. Boo Boo has been lovely, Waker and Les are largely indifferent. Franny has, of course, been my sword and shield. She understood immediately — on the night I came out to her, we had dinner together in her apartment and she told me that it made intuitive sense, that maybe she hadn’t _known_ exactly but that it fit with everything else she knew of me, and she started regaling me with anecdotes about my trans childhood that even I hadn’t realized were at all significant. (Do you remember my Halloween costume when I was in the fifth grade? I went as Dr. Rosalind Franklin, with whom I was obsessed at the time, and we dressed Franny as a DNA strand to match. All the old ladies in the rent-controlled apartments in our building asked if I was a mad scientist — one of them thought I was Einstein — and I told them all, impatiently, that no, I was _Rosalind Franklin_ , discoverer of the helical structure of DNA, I even had a visual aid in the form of my 5-year-old sister, were they stupid? I think I wore shorts with knee socks so that it looked more like I was wearing a skirt. Anyway, that’s just one of the little gems that Franny had locked up in a safe somewhere.) Even Bessie has started to thaw a bit. She’s still in high dudgeon over my violating the claim she feels she has on my body and my life, but she’s already begun to adapt to the new information; for the past couple of months or so she’s been trying to sell me on the new skincare snake oil she’s into right along with Franny. So that’s all fine, or at least as good as can be expected.

Not so with you. When I called you to tell you, you offered lukewarm congratulations in a voice that sounded like it belonged to Jesus while in the process of being crucified, asked some peremptory questions about the rest of the family, and hung up as quickly as you could. That was last April. Since then, you haven’t said a word to me. It would be one thing if you just weren’t talking to anyone in the family, but Boo Boo told me you called her in July and seemed genuinely bewildered that I hadn’t heard from you — which I guess means you aren’t talking _about_ me, either. Neither Franny nor I have heard hide nor hair of you for over a year, and I know exactly why.

I’ve done a lot of growing recently, as Cousin Annie would put it, and I recognize that not all of my problems are ascribable to you. Nor are they all unfixable; funnily enough, it gets a hell of a lot easier to not get viciously angry at everyone around you when you’ve stopped believing that you have some sort of horrible obligation to behave a certain way for them. But you’re not off the hook, not by a long way. The truth of the matter is that you and Seymour helped raise me and Franny, inculcated standards in us that no one could ever meet, and then skipped off when we came of age with nary a backward glance. There’s a word for that: deadbeat.

Do you know that I pretended to be you on the phone the November before last? You weren’t there for Franny when she was having her breakdown, and I felt I was a poor substitute, so I went to the Duane Reade where the pizza place used to be and I bought a burner cell phone and I called her and pretended I was you. She saw through it, of course, in the first place because she’s a certified genius and in the second place because (as I’ve mentioned above) she knows me better than anyone else on the planet, but I had her going for far longer than I by all rights should have. There’s two reasons for this. One, you and I are very alike, which I’ll go into in a minute. And two, I so badly needed to protect her from your disappointment that the sheer force of my will made reality malleable for me, if only for a couple of minutes.

That is what it was, after all — disappointment. You said to me in your letter that I should really commit to acting if I was going to do it at all, but you didn’t mean it in the way I thought. Empathy, dedication to one’s craft, and religiosity are all, believe it or not, just as important to me as they are to you — even when I was in the deepest troughs of my life I tried to cultivate them in myself and pass them along to Franny — but I will never be able to embody them as you want me to. You see, you want me and Franny to be saints, or bodhisattvas, or _something_ , and I don’t mean that metaphorically. The only way to achieve the standard you set for us is to totally annihilate our own personalities and become vessels for the Divine. You probably don’t blame us for not living up to this, in all likelihood you blame yourself for somehow failing us, so don’t try to wriggle out of culpability _that_ way. The fact remains that you are disappointed in how we turned out, and, whether or not one is at fault, that’s never a fun place for a person to be.

You’ve been disappointed about Franny ever since the breakdown. She’s always been a variety of crazy set slightly apart from the rest of this family of nuts, and in that difference you see failure to withstand the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune the way a good little saint should. But even though you’ve been icing Franny out for longer, you’re far more disappointed in me. Franny and I are more similar to you than any other living members of this family; you and I, however, share something beyond even that.

You are repressing something that you see as selfish and disgustingly profane. To preserve your soul, as you see it, you keep that thing locked up and far out of sight. I couldn’t do that. I have a body, and at a certain point I realized it was foolish to keep denying it.

I’m happy. Not completely, but far more than I used to be. For the first time in my life, I can look at myself in the mirror. More than that — I enjoy it. I love the way my body feels; I take pictures of myself all the time now, and my old headshots feel more and more like a quaint memory and less and less like a punch in the throat. And, yes, it’s thrown a bit of a wrench into my career, and, yeah, my standards for myself are a little more relaxed, but get this: _I don’t care_. I would rather be a happy girl than a miserable saint any day of the week. Like I told Franny all those months ago, it’s the business of _desiring_ that makes acting our vocation rather than prayer.

So I can’t follow the advice you gave me in your letter. I can devote myself to acting, I can maintain a clear connection with Gd, I can do my best to help others even at the expense of my comfort and safety, but I cannot and will not deny myself to attain some abstract purity of spirit. That’s incompatible with being an actor, regardless of what you tell yourself. More basically, though, it’s incompatible with _being_ , for me.

Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about when I say you’re like me. I have your letter; I can send you pictures of the parts where you essentially flat-out admit it any time you like. And don’t respond to this if you don’t have anything to say, either — though I know you won’t need any encouragement on _that_ score. I realize that this is something of an A-bomb of a letter, but I don’t really have anything more to lose at this point. The only thing I will actually hold against you is if you keep doing this to Franny. Avoid me if you want, I can’t stop you, but it is quite literally the worst thing in the world to know you’re disappointed in me, and I know that Franny wants you to be proud of her just as much as I do and feels the deficit just as acutely. Just fucking call her, okay? Just get over yourself and call your goddam baby sister. It’s not rocket science.

Give my regards to your lizard, and good luck with whatever book you’re writing now, I suppose.

With love,

Your sister,

Zooey

March 9, 2020

Dear Zooey,

I am writing this with the knowledge that you have probably long since given up hope of hearing back from me. That hurts me, badly. It hurts me so much that I want to retreat into my tortoiseshell and stop answering my phone, but I’m not going to do that to you, not again.

You see, I have failed you. You’re wrong about me on a lot of counts, but you’re not wrong there. When Seymour and I took over your education, we had a lot of high-flung ideas about what we wanted to accomplish, and we ended up giving those ideas priority over the underlying principle behind them: that you two should learn to live as you were meant to. Our hubris overrode all our good intentions, and it made you miserable. And then I was too weak to face up to what I had done, and, as you put it, I skipped off. I told myself for a long time that you were better off without me, and that’s as may be, but I know — as I think I always knew — that it’s no excuse for not being there. It’s no excuse for making you believe that I feel the way you think I do about you and Franny.

I am not disappointed in you. I am the opposite of disappointed in you. I am so, so proud of you. I am disappointed in myself, but not for the reason you think — I’m not upset that I failed to produce bodhisattvas, I’m upset that you’re upset and I’m at fault.

You and Franny have exceeded any expectations I could have had for you, and you did it in ways wholly your own. I’ve been reading your blogs and following your social media for a while — yes, I do have Internet up here, despite all evidence I’ve provided to the contrary — and the depth of your self-knowledge and commitment to caring for others astounds and awes me. That’s the other reason I’ve been avoiding you: you both have surpassed me. You’ve been to places I’ve never let myself go and come through the better for it. I don’t have anything more I can give you; I was mortally afraid of being asked to provide.

I do not in the least think Franny is weak. I am going to pick up the phone and tell her that, personally, precisely 15 minutes after I post this letter. And I do not _at all_ see your transition as selfish or obscene. I would write that in my own blood if it would convince you it’s true. I am so very ashamed to have made you feel that I do. Maybe you’re right about me, I don’t know; whatever the reason, there’s some obscure center of mass I’ve been orbiting since I was old enough to talk, and your call brought me veering in too close to it for comfort. Yet again, I let my own personal issue get in the way of making the little sister I helped raise feel safe and cared for. I will never forgive myself for that.

I can’t promise you that I’ll be a regular presence in your life henceforward; it wouldn’t be fair to you to make promises I don’t know that I can keep. I will, however, do my level best not to be as remote as I have been lately. I want to see some of those pictures of you, and I want you and Franny to tell me about the play and your other work and California if it happens. My book is coming along — in fits and starts, but progressing nonetheless — thank you for the well-wishes on it. I am happier than I can say that you all are doing so well and from now on I’m going to try to hear far more of it firsthand.

I love you. You don’t owe it to me at all, but I hope that one day you can forgive me.

With love,

Buddy

P.S. I have passed along your regards to Axel.

P.P.S. I gather that the question was mostly rhetorical, but yes, I do remember that Halloween costume. That was the year I was in London; Bessie was exercising restraint and only sent me about a Library of Congress’s worth of pictures of you two, and Halloween made for a sizable chunk of them. You were adorable. I didn’t fawn over you and Franny much when you were children — I wanted you to feel that you were taken seriously, and Bessie did enough of that for ten people anyway — but you were always a very, very cute little girl.

March 12, 2020

Dear B,

Of course I forgive you.

Love,

Zooey

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from "Girl Sailor" by the Shins.
> 
> If you're interested, you can listen to my playlist for this book here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4wA4wvuZt5zkAuj5GjR3S4?si=JQ5oswzzSkO8k9fxFL7sHQ


End file.
